Nonprofit news sites are built to generate impact — but these are also generating audiences

Last week, we published the first of our new monthly rankings: the top 25 local U.S. newspapers on the web, based on their traffic. (All hail the conquering Advance Local!) Today, it’s time for the second: the top 25 nonprofit news sites in the United States.

Nonprofit news sites have an interesting relationship with web traffic. Many of them were founded specifically to do the sorts of journalism that aren’t likely to trigger Chartbeat spike alerts: investigations, policy deep-dives, niche topics, or coverage of overlooked and disadvantaged communities. Most nonprofit outlets don’t run advertising, which means they lack the primary incentive commercial news sites have to chase traffic. You’re unlikely to find ProPublica thirstily copying the latest TikTok dance craze; that’s not what they do. And many sites freely give their articles to other outlets for republishing — something that complicates even the most basic measures of “reach.”

That said…it’s good to have an audience, and hard to have much impact without one. Nonprofits shouldn’t be judged by the standards of commercial media when it comes to web traffic, but it’s still an informative window into how a lot of high-quality journalism is reaching (or not reaching) the general population. The 25 outlets we list below have each figured out their own strategies on how to do that.

Our list includes national nonprofits like The Intercept and Mother Jones, statewide outlets like The Texas Tribune and Bridge Michigan, and local news sites like The Baltimore Banner and Block Club Chicago. (Not to mention the Salt Lake Tribune, the nation’s first print newspaper to convert to nonprofit status.)

While there are outlets on this list I expect to see here every month, the numbers can vary wildly depending on the vagaries of the news cycle. (Fun fact: In May’s data, the No. 3 slot was held by the National Catholic Reporter, riding the traffic tsunami brought by the conclave that produced Pope Leo XIV. “We always get a bump when we’re covering elections,” quipped CalMatters CEO Neil Chase, “and I guess they do too.”)

For those who care, I have lots of boring details about how this list gets pulled together, but I’ll save that for the end. (Jump ahead if the spirit moves you.) Here’s the chart; keep scrolling past the end for insights into the audience work of three outlets that made the list.

Okay, here’s the nerd box.

As with the local newspapers list, our numbers here come from the web analytics company Similarweb, which estimates (among many other things) the number of visits websites get. Visits — not monthly unique users (which would be smaller) and not pageviews (which would be larger).

There exists no complete list of nonprofit news sites. The closest thing is likely the INN Index, produced annually by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the trade association for news nonprofits. In the most recent edition, it surveyed 346 INN members.

To create this dataset, I scraped INN’s entire membership roster of 500-plus members. I then did the same for LION Publishers and its 400-plus member news organizations. LION is a trade group for local independent online news outlets, and its members are a mix of nonprofit and for-profit publishers. (There’s plenty of overlap between INN and LION membership — something I even made a Venn diagram about once.)

All told, I ended up with a list of 724 news outlets, and that’s the dataset that these rankings are generated from.

Does my list include every American nonprofit news outlet? No, it does not. (If your nonprofit news outlet is not a INN or LION member but thinks it should be in this dataset, email me to make your case.) One noteworthy absence is NPR, which is not a member of either association (though some of its member stations are). With 80.8 million visits (by Similarweb’s count) in June, it’d top this list by a mile. But even if NPR were a member of INN, it wouldn’t be included here; we have a separate traffic ranking of public media outlets coming soon.

Also, because this is a list of nonprofit news outlets, I’ll be removing any for-profit LION members that make their way into the top 25. But they still deserve recognition! In the June data, there were two local for-profit outlets would have made this list if they’d been allowed to:

• Oil City News in Casper, Wyoming finished the month with 652,455 visits. The site’s doing well enough to have recently launched its own free 16-page weekly newspaper in print.
• In Humboldt County, California, Lost Coast Outpost totaled 657,382 visits. Its entertaining FAQ asks: “Is it a news site? Sometimes. Most of the time, probably.” In June, it generated 10 times the traffic of the local daily newspaper, the Eureka Times-Standard.